"This book is the product of 30 years of experience with program evaluation. During this time, both service recipients and educational and social programs have experienced major cultural and political shifts in service delivery philosophy, including a focus on quality, mainstreaming, deinstitutionalization, community inclusion, and an emphasis on measurable outcomes. Recently stakeholders of these programs have demanded more than just the provision of service, forcing program administrators to evaluate their programs’ effectiveness and efficiency. The “era of accountability” is here, and my major goal in writing this book is to help current and future program administrators understand that they need to look beyond simply the provision of service. Indeed, they need to be competent in outcome-based evaluation, which I define as a type of program evaluation that uses valued and objective person-referenced outcomes to analyze a program’s effectiveness, impact or benefit-cost." (Preface to the first edition)